There are no great books about the Everly Brothers. No classic documentary films. Despite their influence on American pop music, which would be difficult to overstate, or the great, gaping beauty and sadness of their music, we are left with…by
Will Stephenson |
Nov, 2017

A Points South essay from the Kentucky Music Issue. The station’s first transmission was of the revered union ballad singer Nimrod Workman offering a lyrical good-morning salute to “all of my people”—and WMMT 88.7 FM has been an inclusive and…by
Jeffrey A. Keith |
Nov, 2017

A Points South essay from the Kentucky Music Issue. The last time I heard Jimmy Raney play was at Bellarmine College in Louisville. To know that a master like Raney had gone deaf was to know that a Rembrandt was…by
J.D. Daniels |
Nov, 2017

I used to imagine the Holy Ghost as a fog that slept in the rafters of our church. I thought our music, singing, and shouting woke the Spirit. When It looked down and saw us, It was reminded of how lonely…by
Ashley Blooms |
Nov, 2017

An interview with Les McCann from the Kentucky Music Issue. All through high school the band teacher and I were very good friends. He received tickets to all the bands and brought me to concerts. I was in perfect heaven. I never…by
Harmony Holiday |
Nov, 2017

Track 5 – “Rainbows” by James Lindsey FEAT. Cicily Bullard When Lindsey raps “I’m talking rainbows,” I think he must be talking black joy. I think he must be talking the kind of rainbow you see in the shimmer-swirl of…by
Minda Honey |
Nov, 2017

Track 11 – “I’m Going to Organize, Baby Mine” by Sarah Ogan Gunning In the Eastern Kentucky coalfields, unionism—or its lack—was a creed people held and defended as fiercely as those of the region’s charismatic religions. And the music Sarah…by
Elyssa East |
Nov, 2017

Everybody wants to be Southern but don’t nobody want to be Southern, too. To enjoy the culture, to have gentrified ham hocks, but not to deal with ham hocks’ relationship to slavery or slavery’s relationship to the present and future.…by
Zandria F. Robinson |
Nov, 2017

Notes on the songs from our 19th Southern Music Issue CD featuring Kentucky. This faculty, to be attuned to one’s surroundings and the ways in which they’re unique, to be rooted in the local, to be of a certain place—no matter if…by
Oxford American |
Nov, 2017

I make a good firm precise cut with the razor blade into the cork, from one side of the cork to the longitudinal axis. The cork is a segment of a cone, the diameter of one end approximately twice that of the other end, both ends flat. I am too stupid to know the name of this geometric figure and too stupid to know offhand, or even with industry, where to find out the name.

This issue includes “The Battle of and for the Black Face Boy,” a radical libretto by Nikky Finney; a profile of a transgender drug counselor who lives on the border of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, by Jonathan Blitzer;John T. Edge’s exploration of Southern theme restaurants;and more.

"On October 8, 2012, Mr. Juan Perez, drummer for the Beth McKee Band, drove from his house in Orlando over to the Orange Blossom Trail and through the vestigial orange grove surrounding the old ranch-style house that serves as the Randall Knives factory and went in and picked up, for $372.75, his Denmark Special, in O1 tool steel, a knife he has wanted for fifty years since running around Orlando hunting small game with boys better off than he who had Randalls, one of the boys in fact a friend of Pete Denmark for whose father’s store the knife is named, that’s complicated, let’s move on."